Taking EVPN & open networking to new heights with Broadcom Trident3 and Cumulus Linux

Taking EVPN & open networking to new heights with Broadcom Trident3 and Cumulus Linux

As highlighted in our recent press release, Cumulus Networks and Broadcom are expanding their commitment to open networking by introducing support of Cumulus Linux to the widely successful Broadcom Trident3 The Trident3-based switches will be available with Cumulus Linux in the Fall of 2018.

When Trident3 came to the market it offered a fully programming packet processing silicon as well as improved power efficiency. It’s additional benefit was a broad range of scalability, starting at 200 Gbps of throughput scaling all the way up to 3.2 Tbps on a single chip.

We are thrilled to have the world’s most powerful open network operating system, Cumulus Linux, now running on this innovative Broadcom chip. I see three benefits of utilizing these two solutions in data center networking 1) Simplified EVPN, 2) Scalable VXLAN, and 3) investment protection.

Simplified EVPN operations
With the Cumulus and Trident3 EVPN implementation, teams can utilize well-understood and simple networking protocols like BGP to effortlessly build a highly scalable, layer-3-routed, underlay fabric for different address families, including IPv4, IPv6 and EVPN routes. EVPN will automatically set up neighbors, discover information, and exchange that information among nodes. With just a few lines of code, you can provide a single configuration template for all devices.

Scalable VXLAN
Trident3’s programmability allows new enhancements to VXLAN-EVPN, such as BGP-EVPN, to roll out via a field upgrade, avoiding forklift upgrades. Cumulus EVPN on Trident3 supports VXLAN routing/tunneling at line rate. Trident3 supports both the symmetric and asymmetric routing. The VXLAN tunnel scale approaches nearly 100,000 endpoints.

Investment protection
Your data center needs always adapt. Your data center switches should be able to easily do the same. The Cumulus and Broadcom solutions maximize ROI through investment protection with interoperability, flexible positioning and re-use of resources, making it easier for customers to migrate spine devices downstream in the future to operate at the top of rack leaf switches, if and when needed.Trident3 based platforms will maintain backward compatibility to the existing install base of networking switches. This switch flexibility is the number one use case for what is usually referred to as a swiss-army-knife type of platform. It enables hardware and software to be utilized in different roles within a clos fabric, with no additional costs.

Share this blog post!

Scott is the Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Cumulus Networks, helping drive new product launches, training, messaging of the Cumulus portfolio. Scott has worked in various product marketing roles at CA Technologies, Juniper Networks, and HPE ranging from DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Hybrid Cloud, Mobile, APM and SDN to high-end data storage and converged infrastructure solutions. Scott received his MBA from Brigham Young University. Besides focusing on transforming networking with open, Linux-based solutions, Scott enjoys acting as a jungle gym for his 5 young kids. He can be found on Twitter at @Scott_D_Edwards.